By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

In this rejoinder to Shana Poplack's response to Stammers & Deuchar (this issue), we argue that our reformulation of the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH) to include specific reference to frequency was needed in order to make the hypothesis more precise and testable. Furthermore, in order to test the assumption that codeswitching (CS) and borrowing (B) are two distinct categories, it was necessary to suspend this assumption in our study. This led us to find support for a possible CS/B distinction, but not for the categorical integration of all borrowings regardless of frequency. In discussing our methods, we maintain that soft mutation is an appropriate measure of morphosyntactic integration in Welsh, and is no more purely phonetic than any other morphosyntactically triggered process.